


How to Live and Die At Your Post

by thestarkinwinterfell



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-07-17
Updated: 2011-07-21
Packaged: 2017-10-21 12:16:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 7,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/225073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thestarkinwinterfell/pseuds/thestarkinwinterfell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the moments following Ned Stark's death, chaos ensues. In the tumult, Arya and Sansa's places are accidentally switched, and Sansa finds herself masquerading as an orphan boy on her way to the Wall, while Arya finds herself held prisoner by Cersei. The King in the North begins his move South, a chained man walks free, strong family ties begin to fall apart, and by the time it becomes clear that war was never necessary, it is far too late for any of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

He has become remarkably good at pretending that he doesn’t know exactly what has gone wrong.

He has been sitting in the Red Keep since dawn, legs folded carefully beneath his robes, back pressed uncomfortably against the cool stone wall in the very back. His corner is deep and dark and no one looks there anyway; not a single person who comes in all day. He sees them, though. He always sees them.

He sees the Queen when she comes in moments after he arrives, sculpted and perfect in the deep black of mourning. Her soft footfalls click against the tile floor as she crosses, until she seems to stop despite herself at the foot of the Iron Throne. She considers it, for a moment, and looks back the way she came, as though she just cannot shake the feeling that someone might be watching. Then, slowly, she mounts the steps and takes a seat, and sinks back against the crooked, writhing metal as though it is the softest featherbed. He sees her, watches ecstasy like victory and battle and sex swim across her face. And when she rises, he is watching her still, as she smoothes her skirts and breathes in deeply and swirls from the room, as though no one will ever know what she has done.

He knows. He always knows. And he has become so remarkably good at pretending he doesn’t know a thing.

He sees Littlefinger when he passes through, humming a song under his breath and clutching ledgers to his chest. He, too, stops to view the Iron Throne, though he does not mount the steps. Try as she might to be anything but, Cersei Lannister is still a woman, soft and sentimental in all the wrong places. Petyr does not need to touch; he knows patience; he will wait, and if he is nine-and-seventy by the time he lowers his creaking bones onto the Iron Throne, the moment will be all the sweeter. He watches Petyr Baelish turn to leave, and finds himself humming the same tune hours after the other man is gone.

Sansa Stark comes through around midday, muttering to herself under her breath. She does not spare the Iron Throne so much as the tiniest glance, but twists the fabric of her skirts between her fingers and keeps her head down. She is gone as quickly as she came.

He watches and pretends not to know where she is going.

He sees them all. He sees nothing unexpected. And he adjusts his back against the uncomfortable wall and he waits.

The day is bright and clear, or so it seemed at dawn when he traced his hidden ways from his own chambers to this room, with the great vaulted ceiling and ugly, twisted throne. He would never dare to touch it, never want to touch it, but then again the things that he desires are as convoluted as the throne itself. He doesn’t particularly care. The day may seem lovely; the common people might flood the market and the square, might climb the steps to the Sept and thank the gods for a day like this, but he will sit in his corner and wait, because someone should be watching when everything goes wrong. It’s far too late to change a thing, but someone should be watching.

Late afternoon brings silence with it. The Red Keep is empty. The empty echoes have died away. At the foot of the stairs at the great Sept of Baelor, the crowd has gathered, and when he closes his eyes, he pretends that he can hear their angry screams.

 _Traitor. Liar. Scum._

He can picture these events so easily that he does not need to leave his seat, not when the great roar goes up and he pictures the thud and the thunk of the head on the steps. He smells the hot stream of blood and hears Cersei’s furious scream. He tastes Sansa Stark’s tears.

He does not open his eyes until the footfalls resume: those casual, slow steps of Joffrey’s and Cersei’s quick, angry strides. The man opens his eyes against the cool, indoor light of evening and watches the boy-king collapse into his malformed metal chair.

“You can’t tell me to go to my room, Mother,” he says slowly, tiredly, as though speaking to a child. “I am the _King.”_

He watches Cersei slap her son, and he is mildly surprised that she has it in her. Her sweet little baby is a monster and deserves far more than a slap in the face. He believes that someone will give it to him in the end, but today is the day where things go wrong, not right, and he is just a watcher, anyway. Cersei rails and Joffrey scoffs at her, and the entire argument fades to white noise within his ears. He watches, silently, from his dark and dormant corner where no one even thinks that he would hide.

When the Hound comes at last to take Joffrey to his rooms, Cersei collapses against the steps. She does not take the Iron Throne. She doubles up on herself and folds into a tiny ball on the marble floor. She weeps. He watches. And in the cold hollow where his heart should be he feels no pity. But he does not look away. He watches and is disgusted and does not feel a thing.

He is still watching by the time she composes herself. By the time she looks beautiful and stunning though still gloriously sad. He is still watching by the time the guardsmen come in, carrying the girl as she struggles and screams.

“Thank the gods,” Cersei breathes, as they set the screaming girl down at her feet. “Now, Sansa,” she begins to say, but she stops, and when her eyes come up she is barely even human.

 _“You idiots!”_ she shrieks. _“You damned, blasted fools. You’ve brought me the wrong one!”_

And at her feet on the cold marble floor, Arya Stark suddenly stops screaming.

 _“I wanted the sister with the auburn hair,”_ Cersei is cawing. He voice echoes back across the Keep until the world becomes a blurry mess of her angry, hateful words.

In the back of the room, unnoticed, perhaps because he has become remarkably good at pretending he doesn’t know exactly what has gone wrong, Varys the Spider moves from his corner. His back aches and he is tired, but as he slips from the room, his hand closes around the small brass key in his pocket; the key that he will use to unlock the Queen’s biggest secret; the key that he will use to win this war.

He thinks that tomorrow he will bring a cushion, because he has a lot of waiting left to do, and the deep, dark corner in the back of the Red Keep is terribly uncomfortable. The last thing Varys hears as he scuttles down the darkened corridor is Cersei’s ear-splitting scream, _“Well then where_ is _the other one?”_

If she asks him, well, Varys will have to be remarkably good at pretending he has absolutely no idea.


	2. Sansa

The wind blows and the trees sway and Sansa tries desperately to stop herself from vomiting. The boys— the _other_ boys —are screaming, slapping at each other and racing up ahead and back on their horses. None of them talk to Sansa, and she is glad, because she is not sure what she would say. If she opened her mouth, she would probably vomit, so she keeps her head down and holds desperately onto the reigns of her pony.

What she’s most ashamed of is that she did not scream. They hacked her father down in front of her, and she did not make a sound. She felt her mouth open, there on those steps outside the great Sept of Baelor, but she did not scream. Not when Joffrey called for Ilyn, not when the sword whistled down, not as she watched her father’s head split from his body with a horrible squelch and roll away across the steps. Not a whimper or a scream or a sigh; just an open mouth and a refusal to believe that this was happening.

Sansa didn’t scream after, either, when the hands grabbed her and clamped over her mouth. She didn’t scream in the alley, as the man who called himself Yoren drew his rusty knife and cut her lovely auburn hair from her head. She can barely remember what it looked like, now, except for the sickening image of it pooling at her feet, but the winter wind is cold and harsh without her heavy copper locks falling about her face. But she hasn’t screamed. She won’t. And she won’t cry, not even when the wind blows and makes the trees sway.

Her grip tightens on the reigns.

 _I’m so sorry, father._

The least she owed him was a scream. Right now, in the cold and the dark, Sansa wonders what she will do once they reach Winterfell. She will hug Robb and sob into her mother’s neck and tell Arya that she is sorry they ever fought. She will love her family and promise them all that she will scream when they die. If they die. They should never have to die.

The ride North is sickening, nothing like the warm ride South. Winter truly is coming. Frost creeps higher up the father they go, until the swaying trees begin to rain ice down upon all of their heads. The boys stop screaming. The horses stop braying. And they all ride on in silence, but for Yoren’s rough, barking voice when he sees fit to say a word to those lagging behind.

Sansa is glad that none of the boys try to talk to her. They talk about her, though; she can hear them whisper. They call her the dirty one, because Yoren smeared soot all over her face. He said that she was too pretty for her own good, and nothing good ever came from a pretty boy. She promised herself that she wouldn’t smile anymore, and that will make things easier. An orphan boy would be sad, anyway, especially ‘the dirty one’ who no one wants to talk to.

They ride through the night for days, until Sansa is practically asleep on her horse. Her thighs are sore and her new haircut itches, but she hardly notices these things. She’s barely eaten and her stomach aches, and it’s on the fourth day that she falls from her pony into the soft, filmy snow at the side of the road.

“I’m so sorry, father,” she hears herself say. “I am so, so sorry.”

The swaying trees crackle and blur. Snow melts and gets in her hair. Somehow Yoren reaches her, first, and pulls her up with strong hands. Sansa goes as limp as a ragdoll, and, somehow, here in the middle of the King’s Road with boys who will be black brothers watching, she finally finds a scream.

It tears from her throat violently, shattering the eerie silence of winter like a pile of brittle broken bones. The trees sway above her as she closes her eyes and shrieks. The boys draw back and the birds caw, and somewhere far away a wolf howls. _The lone wolf dies but the pack survives._ Sansa has lost her pack. Her chest bursts and she knows it won’t be long now, can’t be long now, until the cold dagger of winter takes her, too.

She screams for what feels like forever, so that by the time her lungs give out and she opens her eyes, the only person she can see is Yoren. He has propped her up against a tree and is watching her.

“So sorry,” she says breathlessly, unsure of who she is talking to anymore.

Yoren fixes her with a heavy, calculating stare. “You are _never_ going to do that again, boy. Do you understand me?”

Sansa nods. She doesn’t think that she could manage another if she tried. She feels the way she does whenever she vomits, disgusting and nasty but so much better, at least empty, if nothing else. She wraps her arms about her waist and wishes that she needed to stop herself from crying, just so that she would have something to do.

“Your name, boy?” Yoren growls.

Sansa tries to say that name he gave her but it will not come out. She clears her throat and tries again. “Sandor.”

“Good boy,” says Yoren, and offers her his hand. She takes it and he carefully pulls her up.

When they’re walking back to the others, who have finally stopped to set up camp after days of heavy riding, Yoren whispers quietly in her ear. “You hold it in, boy, and I’ll have you home to your mother and your brothers and everything will be alright.”

“What about my sister?” Sansa asks, but he says nothing, and when she turns, he is gone. She catches his voice floating through the patterns of tents, past the wagon with the three mad men inside, every now and then. But he doesn’t come back, and he doesn’t answer the question, and as hard as she tries to puzzle out the answer for herself, she still has no idea where Arya might be.

She can still feel the scream in her throat, all vibrations now; no sound. The entire forest around them is thrumming with it; the trees shake with it; the cold wind blows with it and the fire crackles with it, and when the other boys call her ‘the dirty one,’ their words tremble with it.

The scream is everywhere except inside of her, and now that she’s let it out, Sansa doesn’t think that she’ll be able to get it back in. _Good riddance_ , she thinks. _Let the world have it. What’s one more scream from one more lonely girl who’s left the screaming for far too late?_ One meaningless noise, and now she has nothing more to say.

And, that night, when the other boys call her ‘the crazy one,’ Sansa doesn’t feel a thing.


	3. Arya

The bells toll on the third day.

They have confined her to Sansa’s room, which Arya finds horribly cruel and unusual. Don’t they know that she hated Sansa? Don’t they know that this is all Sansa’s fault? Arya feels the angry hot hatred pooling in her stomach as the memory of Sansa’s face swims up to meet her. Their father confessing crimes he could not have committed, and Sansa’s calm, encouraging smile just before everything fell apart.

What she is most ashamed of, now, three days later in this high tower that looms above the city, is that she screamed. Arya can hear the echoes in her ears, still slowly dying away. She fights it for most of the first day, after the Queen carries her to Sansa’s empty room and dumps her inside. She fights it through the afternoon and well into the evening; well into the dusk and through the quiet night. And by the time that morning comes, the ache has given way to dull regret, and she doesn’t have to fight it anymore.

On the second day, she finds Sansa’s dresses. They are many and various, delicate and colorful and light. Arya takes one in her hands; she has never touched a garment so fine, and she puts it back immediately, almost expecting Sansa to reappear and scold her should she break it.

 _Don’t you dare touch my things, Arya. You’re worse than any boy. You have no delicacy. No tact._

Arya sits down on the floor and doesn’t cry, and wonders about her delicate, tactful sister and what they have done to her now.

Night brings dinner, and a cold hard rap at the door. Arya does not answer it, and the heavy scrape of receding footsteps confirms that no one really minds. She crosses her legs on the cold floor of Sansa’s rooms and when the night falls heavily on an otherwise sleeping city, Arya curls up into a tiny ball on the floor and goes to sleep.

Sansa’s bed is still made when she wakes up in the morning.

The bells toll just after noon on the third day. The Death bells. The mourning bells. And Arya thinks for one irrational moment that the city weeps for her father. She rushes to the window, desperate to mourn with them, to give her poor dead father something more than a pointless, anguished scream. She pushes open the window and lets her body burst through, until she is nearly tipping out and over in her haste.

But then she knows what has happened, as soon as she sees the evil little boy king dressed in mourning black. Arya doesn’t make a peep, doesn’t voice a sound, doesn’t even scream until her throat bleeds and her lungs collapse. She just listens as the mourning bells toll for her fragile older sister, and swears to the old gods and the new that she will never scream for a family member ever again.

Down below, the Queen is addressing the people, and Arya hears only bits and pieces of what she says. ‘Violently ill’ and ‘sick with grief’ and ‘passed away in the night’ all trickle up the tower walls to meet her ears. Arya clenches her fingers around the window ledge and pulls herself forward, until almost her entire body hands out over the edge. A hundred feet up, at least. She almost lets go.

But at the last second she thinks of Bran, her poor little brother who fell and fell and did not scream, who father said woke up after they left, who is still alive despite everything. Arya stares down at the gracious, easy ending that lies before her on the ground below, and then pulls herself back inside, into captivity, where it is most likely that they will clip her wings and comb her hair and force her into dresses that Sansa would not have wanted her to touch. But they will never hear her screams, Arya decides, no matter what they take away.

She races to the closet, where she had left the pretty perfect dresses, and throws open the door. Then she finds Sansa’s luggage under the bed, gently unpacked and stored in the neatest of possible ways. Arya drags it across the room to the closet, where she proceeds to strip the clothes from their hangers for hours, folding them as neatly as she can and setting them into Sansa’s trunk.

She starts with the ones that she has seen Sansa wear, the pink one and the green one that compliments her hair. Then she packs the ones that she knows Sansa has _made_ , which are somehow a thousand times more beautiful than all the rest. She folds them most carefully of all, as though if she jostles them around she might lose a bit of Sansa-magic that sits within their stitches.

Finally, she packs the ones that are obviously gifts from the Queen, and though she does pack them, she folds them less carefully and stuffs them in atop the others. Then, in the very back of the closet, Arya finds the last thing she ever expected to see.

Behind all of the finery, now that is has been stripped away, hangs a single blue dress. It is Winterfell colors, Stark colors, and the seams and stitches show that it was made by a child’s hand. Arya recognizes the dress immediately: it is the first dress she ever made, which she handed to her sister and screamed, ‘WELL, IF YOU THINK IT’S SO HORRIBLE, THAN WHY DON’T YOU MAKE IT BETTER?’

Clearly Sansa never had, because the stitches are just as sloppy now as they were then, and the weaving just as poorly and unevenly done. But there it hangs, though her sister must never have worn it, there it hangs in the back of the closet where they are holding Arya captive and would have rather held her sister if they could.

Arya takes this dress out and does not fold it, but rather wraps it around her neck and clings to it as a child would a blanket. She does not cry or scream, because though she might not be a Lannister, she thinks that she should always pay her debts. She owes it to her family not to fall apart, and, when the time comes, she thinks she owes King Joffrey a sharp knife to the gut.

Night comes quickly on that third day, as Arya stares blankly at the wall and clutches this one bit of proof that her sister might have loved her, once. And tonight, when she ignores the dinner knock, a key clicks and the door swings open, and Queen Cersei moves to stoop beside her on the floor.

“Come, child,” she says gently, as though she thinks that Arya will be as easily fooled and persuaded as her poor, sad sister. But somehow, when the Queen says the words, Arya stands, and though she still holds the dress tightly around her shoulders, she follows behind the Queen without a word.

Finally, when she finds the curiosity to speak, Arya asks where they are going.

“To see the Hound,” the Queen says quietly. “It appears that we will be short on guards for quite a while.”

Arya ask where all the guards have gone, but Cersei does not reply. They walk in silence.

The Hounds chambers are nice enough, just outside King Joffrey’s in case something should go wrong. They smell of ale and those disgusting scented candles that Sansa always liked, and when Arya won’t stop asking him where all the guards have gone, the Hound finally drags her to a tiny cot in the corner and tells her to sleep.

She lies there, staring at the ceiling for hours after the Hound’s snores fill the adjoining room. Arya stares at the ceiling and asks herself where the guards might be again and again. And then she tries to puzzle the pieces together in her mind and thinks about the only answer that the Hound would give her.

 _They’re looking for your pretty older sister, wolf bitch._


	4. Catelyn

She is watching Arya chase cats through the streets of Winterfell.

“Cat,” Arya calls, slow and soothing, and races off after the tiny creature. Catelyn follows, only walking but somehow keeping up. Arya chases the cat through the snowy, silent streets, calling out ‘cat’ again and again.

“Cat,” she says once more, and her voice is Ned’s. Catelyn looks up. Ned is kneeling before her on the steps of the great Sept of Baelor. “Cat,” he says quietly, and Arya has disappeared. Catelyn pushes forward, but the crowd that has materialized around her blocks her way. Ned turns away from her, toward the Queen, and calls urgently to her.

“The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword,” he urges. “A King— or Queen — who hides behind paid executioners soon forgets what death is.”

The Queen ignores him, but Catelyn pushes forward. “What if they never knew what death was in the first place?” she cries, the question coming unbidden and unexpected to her lips. “Ned—“

But the sword comes down with a whistle and her beloved husband’s head hits the steps with a thud.

There is a scream. For a moment, Catelyn thinks that it’s her own, but when she looks around she sees Sansa crying. Of course Sansa would scream. Sansa would be the one of all of them to scream. “Mother!” Sansa cries. “Mother!”

Something bumps Catelyn’s feet. She looks down, and the severed head that leers up at her is her very own. “Mother!” Sansa screams.

Catelyn shrieks and opens her eyes, and Robb is gently shaking her awake.

“Mother,” he says quietly, and though he has the kindness to pretend that she hadn’t screamed aloud, Catelyn cannot find the courage to meet his eye as she pulls herself from bed and ties a dressing gown around her waist. The back of her neck is sweaty, and it cools in the cold winter air as Robb leads her from the tent.

They walk a long ways, away from the darkened, silent camp to the base of a hill, which they begin to climb slowly in the dreary night. The cold grass sticks between Catelyn’s toes and numbs the bottoms of her feet. She is trembling as she thrusts her hand into Robb’s, and he squeezes it tightly and does not let go.

When they reach the crest of the hill, Robb pulls her back, and, with one finger to his lips and his hand still clasped with hers, motions with his head toward the small valley below. There, fires are blazing, leaping high into the sky and roasting the night’s silence with their crackling. Catelyn stares, then turns with curious eyes back to their own camp, which is nearly invisible to the naked eye, the fires long put out.

She turns to Robb. “Who are they?”

“Lannister men,” her tall, strong son replies, with a disgusted shake of his head. “Tactless as they are gilded.”

It is then that Catelyn sees the way the fire glints off of red and golden armor. “What do they want?”

Robb shakes his head. “They’re merely passing by. I doubt they know we’re here. If they did, they might have moved on. We’re twenty-thousand to their five-and-thirty.”

“But what do they _want_?” Catelyn repeats.

And Robb says quietly, “I don’t know.”

They stare in silence for a while, two quiet, lonely figures lost in those crackling, home-made stars. The men below eat and drink and laugh, and still the two Starks look on, clasping hands in the freezing chill at the end of summer.

“What will you do?” Catelyn asks after a while.

Robb shrugs. “I will do nothing. At dawn they will pack up and ride on, and so will we.”

“I do not like to see them so far from home,” she persists.

“It has nothing to do with us, mother.”

“It has everything to do with us,” she insists. He says nothing.

In the end, they are standing there when the tent flaps begin to close and the shouts fade to silence. In the end, they are the only two people left watching the fires, and they stoke them with their watchful eyes from above until the flames leave blue and yellow prints on the inside of their eyelids.

“I miss father,” Robb says finally, when the pale touch of dawn begins to appear at the horizon. Catelyn squeezes his hand, which has not yet left hers.

“He would be so proud of you,” she says honestly. “So very, very proud of the man that you’ve become.”

“A killer,” Robb replies, “like any other man.”

 _He’s right,_ Catelyn thinks. _A killer just like any other man. Is life honestly so simple? Do women grow up to weep and men to kill?_ “No,” she says quietly. “Not like any other man. As long as you never forget what death is.”

Robb collapses into her, and she wraps her arms easily around him. “Joffrey did not swing the sword himself, did he, mother?” he chokes, and Catelyn shakes her head.

“No, my son. No, he did not.”

They clutch each other and tremble until the sun is high enough for the camp to start stirring. Lannister men begin to disassemble tents on one side, and when the two of them turn, their own camp is waking. Northerners in heavy fur cloaks begin to pack away weapons and armor onto carts, calling out to one another in high, clear voices that pierce the morning air like a thousand angry knives.

Catelyn and Robb release each other, a King and his Lady of Winterfell; a son and a mother only in the most private of moments. It is the Greatjon who spots them first, two figures, dark against the grey-blue sky. He approaches them, with slow strides that seem to take forever. He climbs the hill. They do not move to meet him. Something is off in the way that he moves, in the downcast position of his eyes.

“Lady Stark,” he says when he reaches them, far more softly than she has ever heard him speak. In his hand is clasped a rolled up bit of paper. “There’s been a raven from King’s Landing.”

 _Ned’s bones,_ she thinks. _Send me back my husband’s bones so that I might bury him in the halls of his fathers._ But she knows that this cannot be. Black wings, black words.

“What is it?” she breathes. The Greatjon hesitates.

“Your daughter,” he says. “Your daughter, Sansa.”

The deafening, broken scream splinters every aspect of the cool grey morning. Birds scatter from the treetops. The Greatjon takes one large, shocked step back as pale fingers tangle in auburn hair and blue eyes squeeze shut. The shriek echoes wildly across the empty, grassy plane.

Catelyn’s shattered heart gives way to pieces inside her chest, but she stands, still and calm and silent, and somehow manages to catch her screaming, broken son before he collapses to the ground.


	5. Sansa

One of the other boys kicks her awake.

“Let’s go, Dirty,” he snaps, and kicks her one last time for good measure. Sansa rolls over and takes a deep breath of morning air. Her mouth tastes like ash and snow, but she no longer minds. Just as with her short, choppy hair, she cannot remember anything different.

It has only been a week, or perhaps two, but it feels as though they have been riding forever. Yoren whispered to her the night before that today would be the day that he would have her home, that they would turn off the King’s Road and leave her, and she would have her mother. Sansa had clutched her blankets tight around her and dreamed of home all through the night. Which is why, in the cool grey light of morning, she cannot say she is terribly unhappy. Hope beats its fragile wings inside her chest as she loads her pack onto the back of her pony and mounts it.

They have only been riding for half the day when everything goes wrong.

“Lannister men!” calls a boy at the back of the line. “Lannister men at the rear!”

The forest comes alive around them, sounds from all sides, most of them manufactured in Sansa’s mind. She expects fear to come, but something inside her has turned as cold and hard as winter and when she seeks fear, all she can think is that she is ready. This will be her chance to show them that they will never hear her scream.

She pulls the reigns and halts her pony, as rivers of soon-to-be black brothers swarm past her. The younger boys are frightened, while the older ones are itching for a fight. The three men inside the wagon sit passively, their disinterest more palpable than the chill mist hanging in the air.

“Come on, Dirty,” the boy called Hot Pie screams as he rides past. “Come on!”

But he doesn’t waste more than a second on her, and even he too is gone in the crowd. And then Sansa is alone, listening to the sound of her pony breathing and hoof beats coming from all directions.

She swears she sees a flash of gold through the trees.

 _Come to me,_ she thinks. _Come to me and take me. Take me to Arya and my father and let me see them. I won’t scream. I promise not to scream._

“I promise not to scream,” she says aloud, as the sound a horse and the smell of a man descend on her from behind. She closes her eyes. A hand grabs her arm and yanks her down, and she crumbles from her pony into a heap on the forest floor. She can hear the pony bray as it trots away into the mist.

In her mind, she screams, but the only sound that hits the winter air is a startled, ‘oof.’ She supposes that it doesn’t count if she keeps her eyes closed. Arya would have fought, but Sansa does not want to fight. She simply wants to show that she can die, too, as quietly and gracefully as her father.

As painless as cutting her hair.

As easy as numbing her heart.

She opens her eyes and stares up at the canopy of frosty trees. And Yoren grabs her under the arms and yanks her up onto his horse.

“You’re more trouble than you’re worth, Sandor,” he barks, and then he digs his feet into sides of his horse and then they’re moving, Sansa with her eyes shut tight again as she clings to Yoren’s waist. The heavy black material of his cloak almost warms her. She wishes, for a moment, that she had one of her own.

Night has fallen by the time the catch up to the others. Though all of them have been riding through the day, the boys are beginning to lag, and Yoren is a faster horseman than all of them. They come upon the others milling aimlessly about a field some leagues east of the King’s Road. Five deserters, Yoren counts, and three-and-twenty too scared to move a muscle.

“Camp here,” he barks out. “No fire.” And without another word, grabs Sansa by the collar and hauls her off beyond into the trees.

“What in Seven Hells is wrong with you?” he growls, and this time he is less than gentle when he shoves her up against a tree. “I am sticking my neck out for you and your family, and you have the good grace to offer yourself up to passing Lannister guards?”

Sansa shrugged. “I longed for death.”

Yoren turns and spits onto the ground. “Bullshit.”

“I longed to face death unafraid,” she amends.

“Life is too short for heroics, boy,” Yoren growls. He loosens his grip on her, and she goes slack against the tree. That will leave a bruise.

“My father—“

“Your father is dead, child.”

Sansa doesn’t scream.

“Where are we?” she asks instead.

Yoren turns away and kicks the trunk of a tree. “I’d say a good ways north of Hornwood. South-east of the King’s Road.”

Sansa starts. “But that’s—“

“North of Winterfell,” Yoren finishes. “I am well aware, boy. It looks like we’re going to have a change in plans.”

“But my mother, and my brother, and—“

“A few moments ago you claimed that you longed for death. Make up your mind, _my lady_.” And he turns and stomps away from her through the trees.

She considers running, then, but she knows so little of navigation and direction that she would surely die in the forest. _And isn’t that just what you wanted?_ she thinks, and knows then that it is not what she wants at all.

Instead, Sansa sets her lips into a grim, straight line, a look she has seen her mother wear many times. She sits down in the snow and lays her head against the trunk of a tree, and breathes in deep. She sleeps.

In her dreams, she is not frightened. In her dreams, she and Arya are the only two left. Arya wears an ugly, poorly sewn dress, and Sansa is naked. When the wind blows cold and Sansa begins to shiver, Arya strips off the dress and hands it to her.

“You need it more,” her little sister says, and when Sansa tries to wrap it around the both of them, somehow it becomes just big enough for the two of them to fit.

Yoren comes to wake her at dawn, and she is shivering when her eyes open into the cold grey light. A raven caws from his shoulder.

“Here,” he says roughly, shoving a piece of parchment into her hands. He follows it with a quill. “Sign your name. Your real one.”

The letter looks long, and Sansa does not bother to read it. Instead she signs her name quickly and simply and hands the letter back. Yoren takes it and ties it to the Raven’s leg.

 _Sansa,_ it caws. _Sansa. Sansa. Sansa._

“Shut up, beast,” Yoren snaps.

The full five-and-twenty of them follow the raven North an hour later.


	6. Cersei

There is a corner at the back of the Red Keep, and its unassuming depths have eyes.

Cersei stands before it on a cool, boring day and listens to Arya Stark’s screaming echo in the back of her head. She burned all of Sansa’s dresses the night before, but these mourning gowns are getting itchy, and though Cersei is tired of the people she is supposed to care about dying, she isn’t terribly fond of having them around, either.

But now she stands in the corner, back to the Iron Throne, with her gentle hands folded delicately at the front of her gown. She stares. There is a cushion in the corner, a soft, silken, womanly thing that completely baffles her. Of course she knows that she is always being watched, often and well, but never did she think a spy would hide in such plain sight, or that she would fail to miss him if he did. And the cushion confuses her most of all, not because of it’s presence— the corner cannot be comfortable for one man or woman to crouch in daily —but because whoever owns it has the gall to leave it lying around.

After a moment, Cersei reaches for it, timidly, as though frightened that it might combust. And, before anyone can see that she has been here, she turns on her heel and quietly strides back to her chambers.

She burns the cushions in her rooms, remember less than fondly the day she first began her moonsblood. She and Jaime had woken in her bed, swathed in their nightclothes and nestled tightly. It had been Jaime to notice the blood, and his two-and-ten-year-old eyes had filled with utter regret as he apologized again and again for hurting her. But she had looked down, and it had taken them only moments to locate the source of the blood. At that, Jaime’s apologies had turned to laughter, as he asked if he had to treat her like a ‘lady’ now.

“You’re gross,” he’d said, and though Cersei had known that he didn’t mean it, the words still stung. But the jeers had gotten worse, and when Jaime had told her that their father planned to marry her now, to the fattest lord in all the cold, cold north, Cersei had ordered him to help her burn her bed sheets.

They had stuffed them into the fireplace, but the maids had caught them and confined Jaime to his room for weeks. Cersei had gotten a better fate, after Tywin had embraced her and promised that Jaime’s japes were nothing more than that.

As she watches the cushion burn, she remembers the smell of her bed sheets, and the utter, endless panic as she sought to hide the truth from her father. Useless, of course, as with most of her endeavors in life.

 _Smoke and mirrors and fire and lies._ She chokes on her own bile and sits down on the floor of her room. For a moment, she misses her life as it was. She misses Jaime coming to her rooms and ripping her clothes from her body. She misses his hands, his face his— She misses _him_ and the way that he would never let Joffrey come to harm. His son. His seed.

Seven Hells, now she just wants to hold him. To sit next to him in public and quietly keep their secret, to feel less empty and more whole. To know that he is not going to die.

Cersei turns and retches all over the wood floor, and she cleans it up herself, just as she wiped the blood from the floor at Casterly Rock on that long ago day when she was two-and-ten. And then, just as she did for those few weeks when Jaime was kept from her, she closes her eyes and holds back the tears until she thinks that they won’t come.

Tears are for the weak. Screams are for the dying. She pulls herself together and wraps the deep dark black of her mourning gown around her like a cloak.

 _For my husband,_ she tells them all. _For my eldest son’s bride-to-be. For Eddard Stark and our missed chance at mercy._ But really, oh really, she mourns for her brother, so far away, alone in the dark where not even his golden hair can light his way back to her.

Cersei takes to the empty corridors of the castle; it is early yet and the sky is barely lit. The other inhabitants will not be up for hours, and she does not have to fear anyone recognizing her bloodshot, tears-stained eyes for what they are.

She walks swiftly and quietly, just in case. Past the Hound’s rooms. She deafens her ears to the Stark girl’s indignant, shrieking questions, which float into the corridor under the door. How Sandor sleeps, she does not know, but she walks on, uncaring.

The stairs she mounts lead her down, down to the deepest, darkest part of the castle where she was once forbidden by Robert to go. “There’s evil down there, my Lady,” he had told her on their wedding night, before he had changed, before she had seen him for what he truly was. She had nodded, understanding and sweet and the perfect wife, and how had he repaid her? With Lyanna Stark’s name and years of neglect so thorough that she was able to fuck her brother the entire time and have him never know a thing.

Cersei has her key in hand by the time she reaches the iron door. She turns it carefully and steps inside, into complete and utter darkness. The soft, moist dirt floor compresses slightly beneath her feet. In the dank and dirty cell, she can see nothing, but she senses another person, knows that he is there. She crosses the floor and halts before him.

His breathing is what gives him away; not the shallow, even breathing of a sleeping man, but the harsh, jagged breaths of someone who has not slept in weeks.

Cersei pauses above him, pretending that she can see his face. Pretending that he is frightened of her, that his expression is not surely pity below her in the darkness. Then she sits, tucking her mourning skirts beneath her and facing her prisoner on the disgusting dirt floor.

“Good morning,” she says coolly. “How _are_ you?”


End file.
